


you traded your baseball cap for a crown

by foundfamilyvevo



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Julie and Alex Have a Late Night Talk That's It That's the Fic, No beta we die like Sunset Curve, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 01:55:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29056260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundfamilyvevo/pseuds/foundfamilyvevo
Summary: The night before Alex's birthday, Julie sits up with a start sometime past ten or eleven.This is what happens to her, now. They'd all changed since the night they'd played the Orpheum. The boys could sleep now, sort of, and eat now, sometimes.And sometimes Julie wakes in the middle of the night and tiptoes down to the garage, just to check that they're really still safe, that they're really still here.Or, Alex and Julie have a late night talk about family.
Relationships: Alex Mercer & Julie Molina, Alex Mercer & Julie Molina & Luke Patterson & Reggie Peters
Comments: 22
Kudos: 139





	you traded your baseball cap for a crown

**Author's Note:**

> yall ready to get clowned when we dont get a s2 announcement tomorrow? me too rip. title from long live by tswift, listened to this mix while writing: https://sunsetcurvecuddles.tumblr.com/post/641266287799074816/tell-your-friends-a-mix-for-julie-and-her

The night before Alex's birthday, Julie sits up with a start sometime past ten or eleven.

This is what happens to her, now. They'd all changed since the night they'd played the Orpheum. The boys could sleep now, sort of, and eat now, sometimes. And sometimes Julie wakes in the middle of the night and tiptoes down to the garage, just to check that they're really still safe, that they're really still here.

She wipes the cold sweat out of her eyes and rolls out of bed, creeping quietly downstairs and outside to the garage. The door is the tiniest bit open, so she can slip in without making too much sound.

Her dad found an old double bed-frame online, and they've set it up next to the couch to create some sort of sleeping arrangement for the boys, though he keeps talking about needing to sort out something better, so they have their own rooms, or at least their own beds. Privately, Julie thinks they prefer it this way, puppy-piled together in their hybrid bed-couch, arms and legs tangled together until it takes time to distinguish where one boy starts and another ends.

As she looks at them, she feels her heart rate slowly decrease from the awful _thud-thud-thud_ that had filled her ears after the nightmare. Luke is snoring, just a bit, and Reggie is wearing one of his new stripey pajama shirts that her dad bought, looking almost gratuitously soft and cuddly with his cheek cushioned on Luke's chest. However, someone's missing.

 _Alex_ , she realises. Looking around in the dark, she can tell he's not sitting at the makeshift work desk, or over tinkering with his drums.

Eventually, she finds him in the studio loft, curled up and staring at the ceiling. His jaw is tight, and he doesn't seem to hear her coming until she's right there. From his face, he might have been crying, but it's hard to tell with him at the best of times, and in the dim light without her glasses, it's a lost cause.

"Hey," she says, soft so as not to startle him.

He still jumps a little, but exhales when he sees it's her. "Oh. Hey, Julie."

She tries to read his face, which is always easier said than done. "Can I come up?"

"Okay." He pulls his knees in closer to his chest so there's room for her to come up and sit across from him, which she does. Their toes barely touch across from each other, and in the dimmer light, she has to squint to see his eyes where they catch the light behind his fringe. "Why are you awake? It's late."

"I could say the same thing to you," she teases. "I had a bad dream."

"I'm sorry," he murmurs. "I know you've been having them a lot lately. Wanna talk about it?"

Shaking her head, she pulls her sweater sleeves over her fingers. It's cold up here at this time, and Alex must be freezing; he always runs cold anyway, the boys say he's been like that since before they died. Tonight he's only wearing some old shorts and his green Bowie t-shirt, which reminds her of how her Dad offered to take the boys clothes shopping earlier in the week, and how Reggie and Luke leapt at the opportunity, while Alex hung back, said _maybe another time_ while avoiding their eyes.

"Are you okay?" she asks, after a moment. It doesn't matter that she already knows what he'll say; it's worth asking, and she wants him to know that it matters to her.

"Yeah, I'm okay," he says, exactly as she expected, but his gaze falls to their feet.

 _What would Luke and Reggie do?_ Julie asks herself, and then discards the thought. As much as she loves Luke and Reggie both, neither of them are experts with feelings. Especially not Alex's feelings. Which she gets, and she respects that they don't like to push him, but...

"Is it about tomorrow?" she asks, gently nudging his shoe with her own socked foot.

There's a silence. He sits up, a little, and crosses his legs, leaning one of his elbows on his knee, and his chin in his palm. "I guess. Yeah. I'm a little freaked out. Like, it should be my eighteenth birthday, right? But it's sort of my forty-second. And sort of my seventeenth, again."

"That must be weird," she says. She hadn't actually thought about that, on Luke's birthday, how old it did or didn't make him. He hadn't brought it up either. It makes sense that it would stress Alex out, though. "And your first birthday since..."

"Yeah," he says, freeing her from finishing the sentence. "It's my first birthday being - are we still ghosts? I don't know. The first one since I died. My first birthday without my family, too, and it's all-" he gestures vaguely and laughs, "-weird."

"Weird," Julie agrees again. "We could always - I know your parents..." _Sucked,_ she wants to say, and if she was Flynn, she would have said it, but she doesn't want to be hurtful accidentally. "But if you wanted to find them, we could. I'd help."

Alex blinks and offers her one of his tight, neutral smiles, the kind that clearly say that something isn't right, but don't let on any more. "Thanks, Jules, but I don't think I want to. You, uh." He sounds sheepish. "You and the guys - you're my family anyway. I don't want to try to go back when it wasn't good to begin with. I mean, what would I find? Either they didn't change their minds, even after I died... or they did, which means I wasn't enough to get them to change when I was alive."

"It wasn't - you _were_ enough," Julie insists. Her chest tugs. The protectiveness she feels for each of the boys has only intensified after their ordeal with Caleb; Alex, of all of them, has had the hardest time adjusting, and the most grief in the process. All the boys lost their families, in one way or another, but Alex had lost his a long time before they became ghosts. Since then, he's lost Willie as well, at least since he's disappeared for the time being. "It wasn't your fault."

Closing his eyes, Alex says, "Yeah. I know."

For a moment, they sit there together in the dark. Sometimes there's nothing that's the right thing to say; Julie knows that better than anyone, after everyone tried so hard to find that perfect thing to say when her mom died. Her grief looks different to his, takes a different shape, but she knows they hurt the same. Sometimes there's nothing to be said.

When that moment passes, and they look at each other again, she says, "You know we're always here for you. And my dad and Carlos are always more than happy to have you guys around. My dad worries that he makes you nervous, but he likes you as much as the others, promise."

Alex's mouth twists and he looks uncomfortable. "Please let your dad know it's not - not him, okay? He seems like he's an amazing father and I'm glad he's bonding so well with Reggie, and even Luke," he assures her, and his voice tips into anxiety, his fingers tangling together in his lap. "But I don't want a new dad, not like Reg does. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah," Julie says. She clears her throat. "I know it's not the same, but - just because my mom is gone, and I don't have her in my life now, doesn't mean I want to replace her."

Alex's wringing hands press together and then relax. He blinks a little at the ceiling. Maybe from the dust. Maybe not. "Yeah. Something like that."

"My dad doesn't want to replace yours, either," she adds. After a moment of thought, she leans forward and opens her hand, palm-up, so that he can take it if he wants to. "Not if you don't want him to. But you can still ask him for help, if you need it."

Alex blushes, but murmurs, "Yeah, I - okay."

"We're still just kids, and it's okay, to want help - or to be sad, or anything," Julie continues, while she has the chance. "You don't have to be totally independent all the time."

"I'm not a kid," Alex says primly, "I'm forty-one. Two. Whatever," but he rests his hand over hers, his fingers shaky and cold, but solid, _real_ , and Julie will never take that for granted.

Giving his freezing fingers a little squeeze, she checks her phone in her free hand. "You're actually eighteen," she says, and sees him grin in the glow of the screen, which reads _12:03._ "Happy birthday, Alex."

He smiles a real smile. A solid smile, like the rest of him. Maybe not alive, but not just a ghost of himself, either. She loves him so much it aches. "Thanks," he whispers. Then, "Bed?"

"Bed," she nods. They head down from the loft, hands still clasped together.

Luke shifts, wakes, even though they were quiet, like he can sense Julie's presence as she comes up by the bed. He opens one eye, and wordlessly lifts his free arm, to make space for Julie to wriggle in under it. She does, resting her arm across Luke's chest so she can put her hand over Reggie's on the other side. Alex climbs in after her, shivering a little as he presses his back to hers, and she feels Luke's arm move under her head to run his fingers through Alex's hair as he pulls the blanket back over them all.

She doesn't know what her dad would think of her sleeping out here, but there's nothing inappropriate about it. The boys form a warm, protective nest around her, and she knows as she dozes off that this, finally, might be her path to sleeping without nightmares.

Besides, it's Alex's birthday. He should have his family close.

**Author's Note:**

> hey i got into this show a week ago and have never written for it before so please be gentle lol. to be fair i've watched it 4 times since then and it's consuming my every waking thought. comments and kudos are always appreciated! find me on tumblr if you want @sunsetcurvecuddles.


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